“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

That was Carl Sagan. This is me. Sorry I been gone so long. Forgive me.

I feel bad. Really, I do. You’re out there — the huddled, blog-reading masses — waiting with baited breath for yet another FANTASMAGORIC entry from yours truly. And yet, nothing. Though I promise you, I have my reasons — namely, school and work. Y’know, real life stuff. You’re right, it sucks. Yet here I am. Why? Well, because the picture above was just too badass to avoid. It’s an image taken over the weekend by the Mars Orbiter which shows the Phoenix lander descending to the polar surface of the Red Planet. The Phoenix is on Mars to investigate the (currently) hypothetical existence of liquid water at (or near) the surface. The discovery of liquid water could lead to the discovery of simple life. And, quite frankly, there’s nothing more awesome than ETs, even if they are of the non-moving, petry dish variety.

That being said, I’m back to the grind. I’ll do my best to update this thing more frequently, but I can make no promises. You know me, straight hustlin’ hustlin’.

The above picture is of Chaitén, a Chilean volcano that erupted last week for the first time in over 9,000 years. It began to spew lava and ash toward the empyrean, 12 miles up, which in turn commingled with approaching clouds, creating a little-understood phenomenon called a “dirty thunderstorm,” wherein it is believed that rock fragments and ash from the volcano collide within the thunderheads, creating static charges that produce lightning. Seriously, how fucking rad is that?

]]>https://iconicionic.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/dirty-thunderstorm-is-my-new-nom-de-plume/feed/1Brock!How’s That For a Slice of Fried Gold?https://iconicionic.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/hows-that-for-a-slice-of-fried-gold/
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Spaced is probably my favorite sitcom of all time. It’s better than Seinfeld, it’s better than Arrested Development, it’s better than the Simpsons. And it’s finally, FINALLY going to be available to American audiences. Created by the same team that brought us Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Spaced has been held up in production limbo for years due to music-rights issues (fans of the State, I feel you), but things have FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY been sorted out, and the Region 1 discs will be out in July. Truth be told, I already own the Region 2 Complete Series, which I bought while I was in school in Scotland, and actually purchased a region-free DVD player in order to watch the series again here in the states, only to be thwarted by the fact that it was not, in fact, a region-free DVD player. Balls, huh? Oh well, I’ll get my chance come July, and don’t be surprised if I try to harangue some of you into watching the entire thing, marathon style. I’m proselytizing this shit from the mountaintop, y’all.

Nike’s advertising department does it yet again. I don’t know how these guys continue to make such original, effective spots year after year, but I’m not complaining. Hell, it almost makes me forget about their abysmal human rights record.

We’re at semester’s end ’round these parts, which means I’m swamped with work all week, hence the lack of posts. My bad, guys. However, to prove that I haven’t been wasting my time, I present the above image, which I finished this afternoon. My last few projects have been a little heavy, what with the zombies and shredded flesh and Wallace Stevens poetry, so I decided this project should be a complete 180. And really, if there’s anything better than zombies, it’s dinosaurs. Dinosaurs! And on top of that, I decided to print it as big as I could, so I am now in possession of a 36″x48″ dino-poster. AWESOME SAUCE.

That little guy is an Italian wall lizard that was introduced to a small island off the coast of Croatia in the early ’70s. Since then, he and his wall lizard brethren have undergone “rapid physical changes that would normally take millions of years,” including new digestive structures and a stronger bite, thanks to a larger, elongated head. Duncan Irschick, a scientist studying the lizards, compared their evolution to “humans evolving and growing a new appendix in several hundred years.”

Which leads me to my point — this study is merely the latest in a long, long line of evolutionary proofs, and yet we’re still arguing for the inclusion of evolution in our science curriculum. We have people like Ben Stein, who is using his position of celebrity to actively attack the scientific community, with his only intention being to further muddle the public’s understanding of the difference between fact and fiction. To put it bluntly, this shit is fucked up. The fact that the education of America’s youth is being decided by people who don’t understand the definition of a scientific theory is nauseating. It’s akin to someone denying earth’s spherical nature because they themselves haven’t viewed it from space. Direct observation simply isn’t an available method for long-term theories, such as evolution. Why don’t we throw out plate tectonics, relativity, and dinosaurs while we’re at it?

I’m sorry, I didn’t really intend to rant when I began this post, but I am constantly confused and saddened by the bullheadedness demonstrated by certain sects of America. Growing up in Arkansas, I’m probably exposed to their idiocy more often than my coast-dwelling counterparts, and as a result I have long since given up debating the topic. It’s not worth the headache. Anyway, lizards are bad-ass, huh? (lizard via National Geographic.)

]]>https://iconicionic.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/i-am-evolving-laser-eyes/feed/2Brock!Like a Young Marvin in His Heyhttps://iconicionic.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/like-a-young-marvin-in-his-hey/
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Saw this video on the Fader last week, and figured it was awesome enough for me to post, too. Go on, Barry, brush ya’ shoulders off.

All the tubes of the internets are clogged today by the glut of people posting this video of the Super Mario Bros theme as performed by an RC car/row-of-bottles combo. Pretty cool, sure, but there are literally a hundred-million-trillion covers of the Mario theme song on YouTube. So I figured there was no better time than the present to collect all of my favorite Mario theme renditions. Join me after the cut for videos of people with far too much time on their hands. (Real Mario via Pixeloo.)

I consider myself a reasonably bright guy. I’m no scientist, but I’ve read a few pop-sci books (A Brief History of Time, The Elegant Universe) and I feel like I understand the concepts well enough. Not only that, I’m a pretty big sci-fi nerd, and have loved the concept of time-travel since I was a little kid. That being said, the first time I watched the movie Primer it made my brain go “ow.” The plot follows the exploits of two Dallas-area engineers named Abe and Aaron, who stumble upon the ability to travel backward into time by accident while attempting to construct a gravity-degrading superconductor in their garage. They become aware of the enormous space/time implications as they become more brazen in their use of the machine, which causes some serious time-fuckery. I really thought I was following everything just fine for the first 2/3rds, but by the last half hour I was wallowing in a puddle of my own mind-goo. Abe and Aaron travel backward in time again and again, creating duplicates of duplicates as the plot’s comprehensibility (and the quality of their penmanship) disintegrates. As the movie wore on, it became increasingly unclear which timeline I was watching, and which copy of the characters were acting out the increasingly byzantine script.

And I loved every second of it. I watched it again shortly thereafter, and understood a bit more. A few months ago, I watched it for a third time, and just recently for a fourth — enough to think that I have a pretty decent grasp of the film’s machinations. It really is a sneaky little fucker, but there is a lot of pleasure to be had in unraveling its structure. Which makes this temporal map of the movie’s time-lines such a great resource. Taken by itself it’s nearly as confusing as the movie, but used in conjunction it can be an invaluable, ah, Primer primer.

Also worth checking out is this A.V. Club article about Primer and the “New Cult Canon.” It has a few clips from the movie and provides a more thorough explanation of the film’s creation and plot.